Architecture for arbitrary extensible markup language processing engine

An extensible markup language document processing engine performs arbitrary processing on extensible markup language documents. The processing sequence of the extensible markup language document processing engine is not fixed, but rather can depend upon the information submitted with the job and upon determinations and analysis during the actual job processing. The extensible markup language document processing engine can also segment the document processing so that different fragments of the document are handled differently, thereby providing parallel processing capabilities. Moreover, the extensible markup language document processing engine can segment the document processing so that different fragments of the document are handled differently so that not all processing is blocked when a fragment requires a slow action, such as retrieval of information from the web.